Realising the full potential of long-term evolution experiments ￼

What are the limits of adaptation? What determines long-term evolutionary rates? How predictable is evolution? The field of experimental evolution has grown tremendously over the last decade. This growth reflects both a greater appreciation of the power of experimental evolution for testing evolutionary hypotheses and, especially recently, the new power of genomic methods for analyzing changes in experimentally evolved lineages. But most experiments are fairly short, typically lasting only a few tens or hundreds of generations in plants/animals or microbes, respectively. Long-term evolution experiments are still rare, but are crucial in gaining a better understanding of evolutionary processes and outcomes, and in answering some of the most important basic and applied questions in biology. This catalysis meeting will bring together leading researchers in experimental evolution, population genetics, molecular evolution, theory and many other fields to develop a roadmap for the future of long-term evolution experiments. The meeting’s aims are:
(i) To identify the most important biological questions that can be addressed using long-term evolution experiments;
(ii) To synthesise information on existing long-term evolution experiments that were both intentional (e.g. lab-based) and unintentional (e.g. disease outbreaks, the pet trade, stock centres, and industrial processes);
(iii) To identify opportunities to answer existing questions with existing data and/or experiments;
(iv) To plan new long-term evolution experiments in a variety of systems;
This meeting will establish an international network of collaborating labs that will result in new research directions, new training opportunities, and a grand vision for the future of long-term evolution experiments.